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Wednesday, May 27, 2015

A travel agent could make quick work of it, or anybody
looking at the itinerary of Expedia.com: Mr. Fernández and I would travel to
Boston on a Friday, stay and take the train down to New York on Tuesday to
attend my nephew’s graduation from Columbia University. So we would travel to
two cities over ten days—easy, right?

In fact, it was several cities that I was visiting, since
the 58-year old unfolding of myself also incorporates the 18-year old,
quivering, version of myself that I was back then trying out on the world. Or
rather, the façade I would show if anyone noticed me, poked me out of my shell,
and made me present myself. Which is to say that I was young, had just had my
first sexual experience with a man, had grown up sheltered and with none of the
wiles needed for a big city, and—as if all that weren’t enough—I had only one
shot at being a professional musician, and this was it.

It was something that had worried my parents, and my father
in particular. My two elder brothers had gone to the University of Wisconsin,
and lived at home, where, however often it might be evaded, there was still
that watchful eye. But what would Marc do, in Boston? In particular, my father
obsessed about what I would do, the first minute I got off the plane.
Did he assume that if I could figure that out, the momentum of whatever I chose
to do would carry me along for the rest of my life? It may be: We thought that
way in those days. One choice would inevitably lead to the next, and next would
be the avalanche that would bury your future, your character, your honor. So
what would I do, in that first moment in the airport? The question troubled him
as well as me.

Here, in Puerto Rico, after decades of planing and
deplaning, the question seems absurd. It didn’t then, since I could read the
subtext of the question: I would arrive in Boston and be stunned by the
enormity of what I had set out to do, instantly realize the complete
impossibility of it, and stand in horror and frozen as swirling crowds of
sophisticated Bostonians swept past me. They all, knowing utterly well what
they were to do, were spinning off to their glorious destinies.

I told my father at last that I would go to baggage, and
pick up my bags, which in some way assured him, though of course it didn’t take
care of the subtext. But it was important to have an answer, and so I went off
to Boston.

I can see it now—it was doomed before it began. Consider the
teacher: A famous pedagogue who told me, before hearing me play, that
everything I did was wrong. So that meant that for an entire week, I was not to
play the cello, but rather to hold the bow at the frog (yes, that’s what it’s
called) and then wiggle my way to the other end of the bow, called the tip. Why
such foolishness? If I ever knew, I’ve forgotten, and the point was that I had
to do it until I could keep the bow completely still in the air. Then—of
course—I had to go back from tip to frog. Then I had to do it….

I relieve you, with those three dots of ellipsis, of the
tedium I endured, because there was nothing else for me to do, that first week
in Boston. I had gone with the intention of spending eight or nine hours a day
practicing, so enrolling in school was pointless. I came to this idea through
my cello teacher in Madison, who had adopted the same strategy, and look where
he had landed! He is now an emeritus professor of the University of Wisconsin,
and has only a high diploma behind his name.

So there I was, knowing nothing about how to play the cello,
and having nothing to do except brood and wonder—had it been a fluke, that sex
with a man? Or would I have to do what I knew, or rather face what I knew,
which was that if I had been able to have sex with a man in a public park while
lying down on the sharpest rocks in Southwestern Wisconsin and slapping without
effect the mosquitoes off me on that July night…. Well, shouldn’t that tell me
something? Especially since when I tried to have sex with a girl in the comfort
of my own bed, and….

I tell myself now: I did what was quite difficult then, and
is still hard for many men and women today. Did I do it well? Of course not,
since I had put myself in a place where I had no friends, and no structure to
make friends. In fact, I was playing spectacularly to my greatest weakness—I
was tempted to make that “my smallest weakness,” which seems more logical,
somehow—which was to be shy to the point of social phobia. I give you an
example: For much of that year, just getting to the store for food was a
victory.

Well, I also forced myself to go to the library, since a
Newhouse without a library card is sort of like a person with a below the knee
amputation: We can get along, and even go places, but it’s never quite right. So
I was reading books on homosexuality, to the point where I detected a passage
in one (famous) book that strongly resembled a passage in another (obscure)
book. So I check that out, and sure enough: Blatant plagiarism!

Only now does the though occur to me: I should have exposed
the (famous) author. But that was unthinkable, since those books that I was
checking out? Well, I could only get them by doing two things: squeezing the
gay books between a top and bottom regular book. Then, I had to study the
librarians: Who was the youngest, the most indifferent,the least noticing? Because what if she said
to me, “excuse me, young man, but I’ve noticed that you’ve checked out Growing
Up Gay several times in the last few weeks. Do you need to see a
professional?”

I’m sitting in a café frequented by two gay guys at two
separate tables; they are young and free and of a type once called “flagrant,”
which tells you what the times were like. Because if I could have done what
these two kids are doing? Been as out and free and what-they-are with no
thought of the consequences….wait. Put it this way—incapable of imagining that
there might or could be consequences.

Oh, and consequences? Well, they were mostly internal,
though there was a time when a couple of guys tossed a bottle at me on Beacon
Street, after calling me a fag. Right—but a fag with nicely long legs, which
worked well enough in those days, especially when powered with adrenalin.

No, the real consequences were internal, since I was not
going to do anything that would lead to the inevitable. And that was the
look on my father’s face, seconds after he had found out that I had been
arrested in a gay bar—or even seen going into one—and seconds before he
clutched his chest, gasped, staggered to his feet, croaked “I can’t breath,”
and then fell to the floor, dying at once from the massive heart attack.

OK—one of the gay guys has left the café. But there’s still
an opportunity: Do I go ask a complete stranger, though very much on my team,
if he had ever worried about this?

Marc: Sorry, you don’t know me, but
we’re both gay, though I am decades older. But I was just wondering—did you
have a hard time coming out to your parents?

Complete Gay Stranger (CGS): Fuck
off, Gramps!

I report—to be fair—that this dialogue is entirely
imaginary, since who knows? Maybe he would be fascinated by a complete relic,
since the time in which I was living—about 1976—was not long after Stonewall.
OK—it was seven years after Stonewall, but the years back then were slower
then. News came by your local paper, which if you were lucky had AP / UPI
feeds. But was anybody writing about what the American Psychological Association,
until 1973, still called an illness?

So yes, Boston had a nascent gay community, but would I ever
get near it, or even into it? Not likely, since I had no social skills, had
never opened up to another person, and was in fact trapped in a pattern of
reading from midafternoon to dawn, getting up at noon, experimenting for twenty
minutes with the stupid bow trick, and then settling down for more…reading.

How isolated was I, in that year I spent in Boston? Well,
perhaps my closest friend from high school was living a mile or so away from me
at the time, and how often did I see him? Perhaps twice.And he, of course, was coming out as well,
which meant that he didn’t have the energy to pick up the phone and call me, as
I didn’t have the energy to call him.

Because the closet? It has a door, and that door has to be
kept closed, closed—nobody, absolutely NOBODY can get in, or peep in, or
suspect, in fact, that there may even BE a door. So it’s really not a closet,
unless it’s the closet of the secret chamber in your basement, the chamber you
have dug alone late at night, when none of the neighbors can hear the chink of
pickax against rock, and nobody can see you as you carry the bags of good,
solid earth from a place which you will fill with your noxious dreams, your horrible
lusts, your sickness awaiting your death.

So it takes energy, all this, since by day you have to go
along worrying that someone will have seen you, in all senses of the word.
Because they do, you know—and especially the ones who, like you, have built a
closet, or dug a dungeon, or perhaps not. Who knows? Maybe they have no need
for a dungeon, having chosen offense as the better strategy than defense.
Because forget the jocks, it’s the “regular” guys who really can’t face themselves
who will out you, call you a fag and a fudge packer, and laugh while you
writhe.

And so, in a sense I was lucky. I didn’t have it as bad as
some. Because there were a whole lot of gay men who had been there before me,
and if the 70s were Wisconsin-cold, the 50s were Siberia. Which was
metaphorically where many gay musicians and composers were, unless, of course,
you managed to get to Paris, study with Nadia Boulanger—who taught everybody,
practically—of any note—and dwell among civilized people. That’s what Ned Rorem
did, and his song below, Early in the Morning, evokes so much that wonder that
a young man, early in love and life, must feel. It tells you what there is—the café au lait, the croissants, the hosing
down of the sidewalks of Rue François
Premier, but it neglects to tell you the other, more salient, facts.
Because Rorem saved those for his memoirs, when he would spill the beans about
the celebrities he had bedded, the youths he had pursued, the debauches that
preceded the early mornings, with their croissants and café au lait. Then it
was home to bed.

I listen to this song, now, and remember a youth that was
more imagined than lived. Because my own experience—then—was much more that of
a somewhat lesser-known composer, Richard Hundley, whose Wikipedia page
including the dead give-away for all of us homosexuals of the 70s: A complete
lack of information about his personal life. OK—there’s this:

Throughout his life,
Hundley has had close relationships with many of America's great composers. In
the 1950's and 1960's, in addition to his teachers Thomson, Citkowitz, and
Flanigan, he was in contact with Noel Farrand, Stanley Hollingsworth, John
Brodkin Kelly, Lee Hoiby, David del Tredici, and John Corigliano. He also met
and socialized with Marc Blitzstien, Henry Cowell, Gian Carlo Menotti, Leonard
Bernstein, Alec Wilder, and Samuel Barber.

Girlfriend,
as we used to say, this ain’t no list, it’s the town’s most popular gay bar
after The American Society of Composers closed their convention. And he’s
skillful, this Hundley, he evokes mood just as much as Rorem. And ever since I
heard the song, Come Ready and See Me, in high school, I loved it. In fact, the song haunted me for years, with its plaintive
refrain, “I can’t wait forever, for the years are running out….”

What
was I waiting for? What wasn’t I waiting for, since every kid starts out with
the curse of having to figure everything out and the blessing of having enough
energy—for the most part—to do it. There was the cello, since I had used it to
wage four or five psychic battles. There was my sexuality. And there was my
depression, which may or may not have been related to all-of-the-above.

That
year in Boston. Doomed, I now know, to failure. But then? I crawled out of the
city after a year, went to the University of Wisconsin, buried my dream of
being a musician, and clung hard to the improbable wish that I wouldn’t go
through my life alone, and unseen.

And
so there we were, Mr., Fernández and I, and he was looking at the buildings and
the boys, since Boston has as many colleges as your lawn has dandelions, but
that was ok, since I? I was whispering down the decades to a person I had left
behind but also had reclaimed, since I was murmuring, “you see? It worked out
OK in the end, even the cello, though that took several decades longer than
estimated, but that’s all right, since the journey, with all of its trudging
and wrong turns and the mud splashed up against my face, well, it was worth it.”

Tuesday, May 26, 2015

It’s not fair, really, to make fun of these people, since
shouldn’t I be picking on people—intellectually—of somewhat similar size? There
are, after all, a lot of intelligent, thinking Christians, who have to put up a
lot of crazies purportedly of their ilk, and do they need me to join the fight?
Of course not.

But I was driven to the Landover Baptist Church by a photo I
had seen in Facebook:

Facebook is a tease, so once I had looked at that, I had to
look at the other stuff, and thus learned that the Bible condemns
left-handedness either four or twenty-five times, depending on whether you
think that a prophet separating the saints from the sinners—and guess what side
each was!—was specifically a condemnation of the left hand.

Right—so I had to occupy myself with that, since it seemed my
work of this morning was to tell you all about the Duggars, which was a
problem, since everyone but me knew who they were. Why? Because other people
watch TV, and so could see the reality show, Nineteen Kids and Counting, which
was all about Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar, of Fayetteville, Arkansas, and the
19—and counting—kids. All of whom are being raised in a “Christian patriarchy”
home, about which I didn’t know anything, except that I did, since the whole
thing has been around forever. Basically, anything that goes in Saudi Arabia
for women and men goes in “Christian patriarchy” as well. Oh, wait, women can
work and run for office in Saudi Arabia—in Christian patriarchy, women can’t.

So the Duggars have for the last ten years been exhibiting
themselves on television, and we’ve all been able to see that wonderful,
wholesome family environment in which alcohol, holding hands, kissing, frontal
hugs are banned, and even some sorts of learning as well, since of course these
nineteen children can’t go to public schools—certainly a good thing, from the
taxpaying point of view—but have to be specially homeschooled, using such
worthy pedagogical devices as ACE, or Accelerated Christian Education. Well, it
was a Tuesday morning chock-full of discoveries, of which
this is the latest:

The ACE curriculum (in "Biology 1099")
asserts the existence of the Loch Ness monster as fact,
declaring it a plesiosaur,
and uses this "fact" to disprove the theory of evolution.[20] In July 2013, this
reference was removed from new textbooks published in Europe.

OK, Wikipedia, tell me—does this mean that the kids in over
6,000 schools in the 145 countries, if not in Europe, are being taught that
that the Loch Ness monster is real, but evolution is not?

Well, of course the Duggars would buy into the Accelerated
Christian Education, especially since they must be of the belief, as the
presenter is in the video below, that “these are exciting but challenging days
in which to live and serve God!”

Yes, challenging, since it has just been revealed that Josh
Duggar, the eldest of the 19 and counting, had “forcibly fondled”—and is it
just me that wonders if that’s not anoxymoron?—five of his sisters. Nobody, in fact denies it, and Josh has
had to give up his job at the Family Research Council—one wonders if the
research is on the same level as believing in the Loch Ness monster—and even
take down his website. Oh, and TLC has suspended the show.

All is not lost, however, since Josh has the support of his
family, and even Mike Huckabee—his longtime pal—since here’s the deal: Anyone
can sin, and if he or she repents and turns to the Lord, then bam, we gotta
forgive him. Because none of us are without sin. And by the way, Josh’s errancy
was wonderfully beneficial in the end, since it forced everyone in the family
to turn to Jesus, and their faith is all the stronger for it! Wow—great!

It’s distinctly screwy, somehow, though maybe not, since
apparently there’s also a belief in Christian patriarchy that women have an
innate evil that leads them to tempt otherwise pure men to do such dastardly
things as fondle—forcibly—breasts. So Josh, was he really all that guilty? Oh
course not—he’s just one more victim in that well-known crusade by the liberal
gay agenda to…get ready, here…criminalize Christianity!

Well, I’m liberal and I’m gay, but I do draw the line at
criminalizing Christianity. But I do have to wonder whether we still have
truant officers, and if so, whether that can’t be told to go after children
whose parents are teaching them that the Loch Ness monster….

Saturday, May 9, 2015

“What,” cried Lady in complete disgust, “I can’t believe you
don’t understand my sonnet! I mean, you can read Shakespeare and Donne, but you
can’t get my sonnet? I don’t get that!”

I didn’t get it either, nor did César, when I spoke with him
three or four hours later.

“What does ‘condone’ mean to you,” César asked.

“It means not to punish or take action, or something like
that,” I said.

“Right, but when Lady used it in her poem, she thought it
meant to deny or reject, so it gave one line a completely different meaning. So
we talked about that, and when I left Lady was lying in bed, driving Google
nuts with searches for possible alternative meanings of ‘condone.’”

“I think she meant ‘condemn,’” I told him. “Anyway, it would
work, if she did, since it wouldn’t screw up her rhyme scheme.”

Lady had her surgery three weeks ago, and her world is now
reduced to the twenty feet between bed and bathroom. Except that she is also
roaming through Stanford University, thanks to an online poetry course.

“So why Stanford,” I asked.

“Because it’s Stanford,” she replied, as if everyone
knew that Stanford was the ground zero for poetry education.

“I have two other students who are critiquing me, and they
always rip me apart. Snobs! But the professor gave me an A, for the sonnet you
don’t understand!”

“I read it when my brain was tired, after a hard class,” I
told her. So we resolved, we would tackle the sonnet after she got done
speaking to Yesi, an ex-employee, whom nobody had much liked working with. All
right, tell the truth: Jorge, the manager, had given an ultimatum—it was him or
her.

“I don’t want to be alone with her, so don’t leave me,
Marc,” said Lady. I was good with that, since I figured that Lady wanted to use
my being there as an excuse not to have what would likely be a hard
conversation. So what happened?

…the hard conversation.

So there I was, at the foot of Lady’s bed, busy writing
yesterday’s post, and listening to Cristóbal de Morales, and it worked too!
Except for the silence between movements, during which I learned…

“….you broke my heart!”

“…it’s just that I can’t trust anyone…”

“…you can’t allow your insecurities to run your life…”

So I can tell you that the hard conversation lasted through
the de Morales, and most of the way through the Orlando di Lasso that YouTube,
quite logically, decided to follow up with. Then it was time for the sonnet.
Lady, like Montalvo, is of the opinion that all you have to do is read
the poem aloud, and the meaning will be automatically clear. So she reads the
sonnet:

Can I have your lips pressed against my own?

Boast to the balance of wine’s crystal orb,

From which no love’s tacit tongue could condone,

And drink at will the cause of its reward?

Tipsy shy your humble vanity’s force—

That leads me to dilute my manner’s hold,

Pray, single soul, if not, one seeks divorce,

That you, as I, can own our own threshold!

The vintage cup at harvest time’s enough.

May all my weathered seasons be the Fall!

But for two, love, decisions of the crush

Can only be hand picked, if not at all!

Consuming God is our free will bestowed

So your mouth from thus, I devote my ode.

“Now do you get it?” she wanted to know.

“I don’t do poetry very well,” I told her. “There’s a lot of
stuff I don’t get.”

So she explains it, and I get it, sort of, though it’s still
sort of not there. But that’s OK, since Montalvo has also sent me a poem, via a
text on my cell phone. So we read that, somewhat guiltily, since Montalvo had
sent it just to me.

“I like the image,” I said, and Lady agreed, though we both
felt it should be ‘I am a flower growing in a cave,’ instead of ‘I feel like…’

“Hey, ‘I am a flower growing in a cave,’ is perfect iambic
pentameter,” I told her.

Don’t worry, iambic pentameter is just five “ta DUMS.”

“I may write a sonnet with that as the opening line, just to
see if I can. After all, I made Montalvo do it, so I should probably do it as
well.”

Lady responded by smacking her lips shark-ily and rubbing her hands together.

“After all, if Montalvo can do it, I should be able to do
it, right?”

Strata of epidermis are flying everywhere!

“And it can’t be that hard, though I had forgotten about the
damn twist in the third quatrain….”

Lady has become the alph- hyena zeroing in on the kill.

“OK—so I’ll do it!”

Time for a kiss, and I’m off, asking over my shoulder, “Hey,
you need anything?”

Friday, May 8, 2015

He was one of my students at Walmart, and I liked him a lot:
He had worked his way up from being a stocker to being a buyer, and that—if you
can handle the pressure of having to sell twenty million dollars of merchandise
in a year—is a great job. So he had done well, and the class that he was in was
one of my favorites.

In that class was another student, who at one time gave a
presentation on Facebook, which in those days I didn’t use. OK—I did, but I didn’t
accept friend requests from my co-workers. Why would anyone? I spent ten hours
or so every workday with these people—was I now to go home and spend more
time—electronically—with them?

All that changed when Walmart and I parted ways; then,
Facebook became my connection to the four hundred students / friends I had
lost. And I quickly learned: My Facebook friends were a lot more diverse than
most friends are.

There was María, for example, also in the same class with
Pablo, and also a wonderful student. Her story was essentially the same as
Pablo’s, with the exception that she had been married and divorced twice, and
was trudging along the arduous road of single-motherhood.

She was helped on the way as many are: By a deep faith in
God. Nor was it as much God, perhaps, as it was Jesus, and I knew that she went
to an Evangelical church. But it was only after reading her Facebook posts that
I realized how “Evangelical” the church was, and how deeply it was affecting
her thinking. She quoted chapter and verse incessantly, and was convinced that
the Godless—should that word be capped? Interesting theological and grammatical
question—were imminently poised to snatch whatever last tatters of religious
liberty she could still cling to. How crazy was she? Well, she urged her
Facebook friends to sign a petition of support for Dolce and Gabana, since they
were being persecuted by the gay Nazis.

I learned a long time ago: Facebook can bring out the
absolute nastiest in a person, though YouTube, with its greater anonymity,
may well top it. At any rate, I didn’t sign the petition, nor did I respond to
her increasing rants that we gay people were threatening to topple marriage and
Western Civilization into the abyss of sin and moral turpitude. Reading her
posts, you could hear the fabric of our society being torn, slashed, rent,
sundered, and burned. Presumably, we gay people were dancing Satanically on the
ashes.

What made it ironic, I thought, was that Pablo, her
classmate, was…well, my gaydar can occasionally blip, but my guess was that
Pablo was either heterosexually challenged or homosexually gifted. And since I
knew that she was a good friend of Pablo’s outside of work, and they were
undoubtedly Facebook friends, I wondered how he felt about all the proselytizing
and commentary.

Well, my gaydar had not blipped, but Pablo certainly had, at
least in my eyes. Because Millie had liked what Pablo had written:

(To my dear Apostle Wanda Rolón, I arrived at the Church of
the Ancient Path with a life in tatters, without work, in depression, seeking
to fill a void in my heart, without identity, believing that by practicing
homosexuality God had erred with me.)

And who is the dear Apostle Wanda Rolón? Well, everybody in
Puerto Rico knows her, since she has the gumption—or perhaps the craftiness—of
standing up and telling it like it is: Ricky Martin is an ambassador from Hell.
Oh, and she’s not afraid to tell homosexuals the truth, either, and that is
that…oh, do I really have to tell you?

More recently, she had been criticized for having received a
prophecy—stuff like this happens to Evangelicals—that a group of businessmen
would buy her a private jet, since her “theology” is that old, well, actually
Ancient Path: “health and wealth theology.” OK—I would call it swindling or,
perhaps more politely, hucksterism, since she is the middle man here, between
God and man, and her take is 10%, and isn’t that fair? Besides, is she to blame
for a prophecy someone made over her? Who wouldn’t be happy, on hearing the
news that a private jet was on the way? Oh, and by the way, it never arrived,
or maybe we should be hopeful—or perhaps up the commission to 20%--and believe
that the prophecy has yet to be fulfilled. The Lord, as you know, works….

Anyway, all of the Godless, in whose camp I reluctantly
fall, were sniggering about this, and that was what inspired Pablo to write
what he did in Facebook.

Well, I read the entire post several times over, and came
upon the telling sentence:

(Today, thanks to this pastor
highly criticized by Pharisees and unknowing people I have allowed God to use
me to free people like me from the prison of living a life of evil.)

I looked, then, at his Facebook
page, and realized that sometime after I left Walmart, Pablo had married a
woman: He looks, in his pictures, to be quite happy, and he is holding a child
(presumably his / theirs) with his wife sitting next to an older child (presumably
hers / now theirs).

I pondered the whole question
yesterday, when I wasn’t teaching. Was it real, Pablo’s conversion, his
“healing” from the “sickness” of homosexuality? Was he bisexual, and thus able
to turn his homosexual side off? What had his background been, and why had he
felt that God had erred by making him gay?

More—didn’t I want him to be
happy? He stands in his photos with a wife and children, and who could not want
that for a friend? I am very clear—I don’t need everyone around me to be gay.

But I also wondered—what had
Pablo found out there, in those years when he was practicing that evil of
homosexuality? Because it’s a different world, now, for Pablo than it was for
me, at his age thirty years ago. And in some ways, I had it easier—there were
still bars, and are there any today? Because however much we tended to become
drunks, the bars were community. But isn’t everything now over the Internet? Is
there any community at all?

Well, I check it out, and yes—there are bars, and there
are churches (not, thankfully, of that ancient path) and there are social
activism groups, since we have a large gay pride march, and who organizes that?
So there were things to do, people to meet, and a life to be led, if Pablo had
wanted it.

Or could have gotten to it. Since
was it truly the apostle’s doing, this loathing of the sin of homosexuality?
Isn’t it more likely that he had felt that way all his life, had been taught
that being gay was sinful and horrible, and had been ashamed and hurting for
years before getting back on the ancient path? And now that he’s back,
well…will he stay back? Anyone’s marriage is a mystery, but how will his fare?
His wife clearly knows that he has homosexuality in his past: Will she worry
that he’ll go back to being gay? Will she watch him, to see if he watches men?
What will all that do to his marriage?

What will he feel, as he grows
older? And isn’t it odd that I ask that, since that t was supposed to be the worst
fate of gay men: We would grow old, our beauty gone, our money frittered away,
our friends fickle and then…bam, we would look around us, and see our
heterosexual friends and family surrounded by their children and grandchildren,
and how would we feel? Ah, then we’d regret the errors of our ways, as we sat
lonely and poor and despised while the whole world went happily on its way,
leaving us only misery and dejection! Hah! See!

Did it happen that way? Sure, for
some. But more often, I saw people who, like my uncle, had been married and had
had children and grandchildren, and yes, that was a blessing. But there was a
lingering sense that something had been deprived of him, and of all the other
gay men who had played straight all those years.

Two things have happened as I
write this: A heart-stoppingly beautiful man has walked into the café, and a
sister-in-law has called, since there will be a family gathering tomorrow which
of course I don’t want to attend but have to because otherwise there will be
hell to pay, since don’t forget, this is Mother’s Day weekend, and for me not
to go? Hah, better it would be to spit in her dear face!

I tell you this, since the
beautiful man has left the coffee shop untouched by anything but some lecherous
looks and memories from me. And it made me remember days long gone with Mr.
Fernández, when the love and the sex was newly minted, and had the shine and
the value of an ingot of gold. It’s just as good, and even more valuable, but
it’s different. And how often have we borrowed against that capital? Because am
I spilling any secrets when I tell that every marriage well, tinkers on the
brink of insolvency at times? We, like everyone else, have held on when there
wasn’t much there to hold onto. And will Pablo have that? Was there ever enough
fire raging to produce embers to warm them in later years?

And my sister-in-law? Well, she
is one more reminder of how deeply embedded I am in Mr. Fernández’s family,
since it is absolutely natural that at any moment Marc can and must be called,
for an affair as important as a funeral or as trivial as a search for the right
music to play for the event I don’t want to go to. So rather than facing a
lonely old age, I’ll have to have well-whetted machetes to break through the
family ties that bind.

So I tell myself, I should be
happy for him. But the question that nags, really, is this: Is Pablo really
happy? Assuming that he is suppressing his homosexuality and feigning someone
else’s heterosexuality, well…how could he be? For that matter, when I was
trading my soul for the spoils of the corporate world, was I happy?

I ended up happy to have done it,
and happier still to have done with it. But there’s a reason, I think, why the
whole issue of marriage equality resonates so strongly. Every one of us at
Walmart felt the same way, and many of us said it openly: When I walk out that
door, I leave it behind me. Put it this way—everybody had a picture of the wife
and kids on their desk at work. But how many had a picture of the Home Office
next to their bed?

And so Pablo has been saved, and
is now married and with children. No, I don’t know if he’s happy, or if I
should be happy if he is, or even if he thinks he is. What do I know?

Well, I hope he really has been
saved, and that God came in and did a good scrubbing, and tossed that old devil
homosexuality out of Pablo’s life, and left the temple orderly and immaculate
and straight, God dammit! Because otherwise?

Life, Death and Iguanas

Life, Death…and Iguanas?Yes, that’s the title of an e-book available on Amazon / Kindle. It’s the story of a woman who took charge of her death, just as she had her life. Of a family that split, and then united. Of a man who decided to live. Oh, and there’s some great stuff about iguanas….Read the first chapter by clicking here!